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T.E. Hulme
Thomas Ernest Hulme (16 September 1883 – 28 September 1917) was an English poet and literary critic who, through his writings on art, literature, and politics, had a notable influence upon the development of modernism. Life Hulme was born at Gratton Hall, Endon, Staffordshire, the son of Thomas and Mary Hulme. He was educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School and, from 1902, St John's College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics, but was sent down in 1904 after rowdy behaviour on Boat Race night. He was thrown out of Cambridge a second time after a scandal involving a Roedean girl. He returned to his studies at University College, London, before travelling around Canada, and spending time in Brussels, acquiring languages. Proto-modernist From about 1907 Hulme became interested in philosophy, translating works by Henri Bergson and sitting in on lectures at Cambridge. He translated Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence. The most important influences on his thought were Bergson and, later, Wilhelm Worringer (1881â€“1965), German art historian and critic; and in particular his Abstraktion und Einfuhlung (Abstraction and Empathy, 1908). From 1909 he contributed critical articles to The New Age, edited by A.R. Orage. Hulme developed an interest in poetry, and wrote a small number of poems. He was made secretary of the Poets' Club, attended by such establishment figures as Edmund Gosse and Henry Newbolt. There he encountered Ezra Pound and F.S. Flint . In late 1908 Hulme delivered his paper A Lecture on Modern Poetry to the club. Hulme's poems Autumn and City Sunset, both published in 1909, have the distinction of being the first Imagist poems.Schmidt,Michael,Lives of the Poets Widenfeld & Nicholson,1998 ISBN 978-0297840145 Robert Frost met Hulme in 1913 and was influenced by his ideas.Hoffman, Tyler: Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry, page 54. University Press of New England, 2001. ISBN 1-58465-150-4 The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme was published in The New Age in 1912, consisting of five poems (a sixth was added later). In his critical writings Hulme distinguished between Romanticism, a style informed by a belief in the infinite in man and nature, characterised by Hulme as "spilt religion", and Classicism, a mode of art stressing human finitude, formal restraint, concrete imagery and, in Hulme's words, "dry hardness".Hulme, T.E. "Romanticism and Classicism." Selected Writings. Ed. Patrick McGuinness. New York: Routledge, 2003. 68-83. Similar views were later expressed by T.S. Eliot. Hulme's ideas had a major effect on Wyndham Lewis (quite literally when they came to blows over Kate Lechmere; Lewis ended the worse for it, hung upside down by the cuffs of his trousers from the railings of Great Ormond Street).McGuinness, Patrick, Ed. T. E. Hulme: Selected Writings, Manchester: Fyfield Books, 1998. xvi He championed the art of Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg, and was a friend of Gaudier-Brzeska, as well as being in at the birth of Lewis's literary magazine BLAST and vorticism. Hulme's politics were conservative, and he moved further to the right after 1911 as a result of contact with Pierre Lasserre, who was associated with Action Francaise. World War I Hulme volunteered as an artilleryman in 1914, and served with the Royal Marine Artillery in France and Belgium. He kept up his writing for The New Age, with "War Notes" written under the pen name "North Staffs", and "A Notebook", which contains some of his most organised critical writing. He was wounded in 1916. Back at the front in 1917, he was killed by a shell at Oostduinkerke near Nieuwpoort, in West Flanders. Writing Hulme published five poems as his "Complete Poetical Works" in ''The New Age'' magazine (published by Ezra Pound) in January, 1912.Michael Whitworth, "T. E. Hulme: The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme," The Literary Encyclopedia, Web, Aug. 20, 2011. Pound also publishes the "Complete Poetical Works" as an appendix to his 1912 volume Ripostes. The latter publication is "frequently referred to as the formal initiation of the imagist movement into modern poetry.""T. E. Hulme," The Poetry Foundation, Web, Aug. 20, 2011. Publications *"The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme," (Autumn / Above the Dock / Conversion / The Sunset / The Man in the Crows Nest / Images / The Embankment / The City Sunset / Susan Ann and Immortality). ''The New Age'' (1912). Ezra Pound, ''Ripostes'' (1912). *''Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art'' (1924) edited by Herbert Read *''Notes on Language and Style'' (1929) edited by Herbert Read *''Further Speculations'' (1955) edited by Sam Hynes *''The collected writings of T.E. Hulme'' (1996, OUP) edited by Karen Csengeri *''Selected writings'' (2003, Fyfield Books) edited by Patrick McGuinness Translated *Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1912) References *Alun Jones, The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme (1960) * Michael Roberts , T. E. Hulme (1982, Carcanet Press reprint) *Robert Ferguson, The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme (2002) Notes External links ;Poems *"Autumn" by T.E. Hulme * Examples of Hulme's poetry (poemhunter.com) Category:1883 births Category:1917 deaths Category:Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Category:Alumni of University College London Category:Royal Marines officers Category:Royal Marines personnel of World War I Category:British military personnel killed in World War I Category:English poets Category:Imagists Category:English literary critics Category:People from Staffordshire Moorlands (district)